I am often asked “where can I find an SEO consultant?” by people who want help with their websites. As an SEO consultant myself this is an easy question to answer! But many people aren’t entirely sure what SEO is let alone what an SEO consultant does.

Quite simply SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It’s a rather pretentious phrase which is about getting your website easily found by the search engines. Ultimately it is about getting your site to be found higher up the search results than any of your competitors. That’s why business attracting traffic online get very excited about it and very competitive.

If you want to ‘SEO’ your pages it’s usually best to ask an SEO consultant but you can also have a go yourself. There are lots of things you can do to achieve this. If you have a site already then you may be compromised by what you’ve done to it already but essentially here are 10 things an SEO consultant would advise that you be thinking about:

1. Relevant content – it’s true that ‘content is king’ if your site is not giving good content value then it will not be optimised as much as it could be. Make sure it’s relevant to the searcher. 2. Title-tag – this is the name of the page that is live. Take a look at the source code, the ‘title tag’ at the top is one of the first things the search engine sees when looking for a relevant result for someone’s search. Name the file after your keyword. It’s not as powerful as it used to be but it’s not unimportant. 3. URL- try to make the title of your site (URL) the same as your main keyword/s. This can be very difficult but there are ways round this even if you think the URL name has already been taken. Split your main words with hyphens – EG if dogtraining.com is taken try dog-training.com 4. Meta-tags These are keywords in your copy that define the content of your page and make sure these correspond with keywords that are being typed in 5. H1 Heading – on your landing page, make sure that the first piece of text is your keyword and make sure it is in H1 text 6. Sub-heading – likewise make sure that your sub-heading is also the same keyword but this time in H2 text 7. Copy – put your keyword several times in the copy on your page. But don’t stuff the page 8. Site map – have a site map. This will help Google to know and order what is among your pages 9. backlinks – arguably this is probably one of the most important aspects of SEO. It is possible to trump all the above with backlinks from high authority sites 10. Links on page – Make sure the links you have on your page (if any) point to good relevant content (preferably on your own site) 11. Longevity – Google considers the age of your site as important. There isn’t much you can do about this if your site is new. But as time goes on obviously you will score better on this.

There are lots of other things you can do both on site and off site to SEO your content. If you want to learn about this then that’s what an SEO consultant would help with.

All SEO tactics used to get your site successfully crawled and positioned in the major search engines evolve with the technology used to render websites, but the basic fundamentals stay the same. There are three major aspects to SEO that you should be sure to concentrate on when optimizing your website – keywords, links, and graphics. Use this checklist to ensure that your site will achieve the highest possible search engine rankings :

Keywords

1. Make sure the keywords that you are targeting are relevant to your website’s content. 2. Keywords should be phrases that are commonly used in the search engines. There is no point in having your website optimized with search words or phrases that search engine users are not going to search with. 3. The titles of your pages should start with your keywords. 4. The content of your pages should be full of your keywords and other related information. 5. All tags on your website should be optimized with your targeted keywords. 6. Be sure that your keywords are included in your website’s filenames.

Links

1. External links are extremely important in search engine optimization. First, make sure that your site is listed in DMOZ also known as the Open Directory Project. DMOZ provides many of the search engine results for the most popular search engines, including Google. 2. Your website should be listed in human edited online directories. 3. It is essential you make sure that your website has a sitemap with text links. 4. Avoid linking with anyone who asks – focus on linking with websites that have a page rank as high as yours or better. Also, link with websites that relate to yours or are complimentary to yours. For example, if you have a fashion-related website, link with other fashion, accessory, or beauty websites.

Graphics

1. Make sure that your website uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). What this does is completely separate the code that is used to “layout” the web site from the content (Keywords etc) of your website. What happens is the Search Engine Spiders are able to completely ignore the formatting code. This makes the search engine spider find your content / keywords etc right away without the possibility of getting caught in bad code or having to sift through unnecessary code in order to find your keywords / content etc. 2. The graphics that are on your website should also have descriptive and keyword rich alternative attributes that are useful for visitors.

Using these three aspects of Search Engine Optimization will surely help your website get ranked faster.

Hello,
I don’t know about your ideas but I think back links are more important than content in SEO. I mean, I create a new page or blog page, it will not be indexed easily.
when I submit these new pages to social bookmarking sites, they are indexed very fast.
So, content is for readers to come back to your site and back links are to get visitors to come to your site the first time.
For me, back links are more important than content because without getting your site indexed, how to make visitors come back?
Your idea is appreciated.
Thanks.

Investing in Search Engine Optimization should be a weighed decision like other marketing expenses. Calculating ROI for SEO can be more difficult than other advertising because costs and returns are often not as concrete, but with some ballpark figures, estimating your SEO ROI becomes a doable task.

Return Before considering an investment in SEO, you should consider the payoff. If there’s not much potential for payoff, there’s no reason to make an investment. Calculating your potential return will also help you determine how much you should be able to invest in SEO.

The first question you’ll need to ask is where your revenue stream will be coming from. Are you getting Adwords clicks to generate income? Do you have a product you’re selling online? Are you promoting a service to try to get new clients? Next you’ll need to find out how much traffic you anticipate getting after your site is ranking in the search engines. There are tools that make estimating traffic for a search term easy. Keep in mind that the majority of the clicks from a search go to the top 3 results.

Finally you’ll have to tackle the most complicated part of the return calculation and estimate the number of people who are likely to follow through and become “customers”. For Adword clicks, around 1-5 percent will become customers by clicking on the ad. When selling a product or service, the number of consumers that convert to customers will largely depend on your industry as well as how well your site sells the product.

PPC Investment Pay Per Click advertising is one of the quickest ways to start showing up in search results. It’s a great place to start because the initial investment is low. After investing $100 into your account, you may be able to get a feel for how effective your ad and landing page are.

Unfortunately, PPC is expensive in the long run. It’s really not an investment approach at all. When you want additional advertising, you simply add funds to your account. The click through rate of paid advertisement is significantly lower than organic listings, and there is less trust from the user because anyone can pay for advertisement. A moderate AdWords budget would be around $20 per day. How many clicks that would translate into depends on the keywords you’re targeting. Budgeting for a year, that would be just over $7,000, and the 3 year cost would be $21,000.

SEO Company Investment Hiring an SEO company to handle your SEO is definitely more of an investment approach to SEO. After the initial SEO is done, any additional work the SEO firm does should help improve existing organic rankings. SEO companies charges for SEO work in different ways. Some of the more popular ways to price SEO are charging by the hour, charging by the project, and charging per month. It’s probably unrealistic to think that you’ll only need an SEO company for the few months that it will take to get you to rank for your search term. Without semi-regular SEO, your website will gradually be outranked by websites that are actively working on their SEO.

Paying an SEO company for optimization services usually gives pretty good results. The results aren’t immediate like Pay Per Click, but the payoff once you start showing up in the rankings is significantly better. Assuming you’ve got a good SEO company, the limiting factor will be your SEO advertising budget. If we assume that you want your website to stay at the top of the search results long-term, you’ll need more than just a one-time SEO charge. To simplify the calculations, we’ll look at the per month SEO billing since it’s set up for long term results. $200 per month for the service is somewhere in the middle of the lower and upper end charges for this service. Per year, this ends up being $2,400, and after 3 years, it’s $7,200.

SEO Training Investment Investing in your own SEO education is a smart move for people who don’t mind putting in the needed time and effort. The amount of resources you put into the SEO is completely up to you. If you’re wanting to rank higher, you just attack your SEO goal smarter and harder.

Whether the entire staff attends a workshop, a few attend a webinar, or you get one on one SEO training will depend on your specific situation. It’s not as much about how you get the training as it is that you learn the concepts. After applying learned SEO concepts, you’ll start to increasingly see dividends on the training.

Workshop lengths for learning SEO range from a few hours to a few days. On average, you can attend a workshop for about $1,500. While the initial financial investment for SEO training is high, the savings over time makes up for the up-front cost. The three year estimated PPC total is 14 times higher than the SEO Training course. The further out the calculation goes, the more SEO Training makes the most sense.

I have been designing online application interfaces and websites. But i dont have any idea how much it cost to do an SEO or how to price it, since most of my projects doesnt involve SEO`s. So can anyone help me with this one please? I`ll help you build your website if you can help me!

There really is nothing more important than the inbound link if we are talking about getting a site listed well in the SERPs (search engine results pages). I have seen this proven, time and again, when a site will pop up into a high position with nothing other than a few links pointing at the site from other, relevant and important, sites.

It’s important to note that these links we are talking about are one way inbound links. These are not reciprocal links. They are also from sites with a high PageRank or importance and also the links utilize important keywords, i.e., the same keyword or phrase as the listing we are talking about.

Next in importance would be the title tag. I have also seen sites pop into the high listings simply from improving on the title tag. Of course everything depends on the competition levels, the higher the competition level, the more difficult it will be to get listings. I have had good luck with title tags in the 12 word range and using keywords within it that appear on the page within the body content.

I would say the most important things with the title tag is to make sure that the keywords you use actually show up in the content of the site. Don’t put keywords into the title tag that do not appear on the page itself. Always spend some time on creating a title tag that is relevant to that particular page.

Next in importance is probably the heading tag. H1 in particular. This should be the most important keyword for the page, and, be what the page is all about. It’s not smart to stuff this tag. I have no real proof that any number of words in better than any other, but in general I look at this tag as a title for the page and hence, try to keep it simple and under five words. Often one, two or three words is enough to define the page. Make sure you use the most important keyword for the particular page. Make sure this tag is defining what this page is all about.

Navigation can make or break you site. Javascript navigation looks really nice but it can’t be read by the spiders. Did you know that? I have seen many clients sites where the main home page gets indexed, but no other pages. More often than not this is caused by the navigation being javascript and the engines never even finding any other pages. I like to repeat the most important navigation along the bottom of the page, horizontally and in a smaller size type. I like this for two reasons, one is gives the engines another place to find the links to the rest of the site, and it also allows for the user to click a link to the next part of the site they want to see, right at the end of what they are reading.

The text used in these links should be keyword rich and definitive of the location you are pointing at. Click here just doesn’t cut it. You want this anchor text to be informative and define where you are going. That is for the engines, but it doesn’t hurt the user either!

I might get in trouble saying that I think code attributes are important. Some folk just don’t agree. I have seen some sites rise in the listings after only changing (or adding) the alt= attribute on the image tags. Use your keywords, don’t stuff them, and make them relevant to what the image itself is. Consulting Logo is a better alt attribute than logo is.

There is a lot more, and it should be known that everything you do to optimize a site works together… there is no silver bullet, no one thing to do, no magic. It takes a lot of small steel parts to build a skyscraper. It takes a lot of code improvements and linking to build a website. Everything works together the same way 30 instruments can create a symphony, or a cacophony of noise!